“Previously on Hanny’s”, I wrote about a wonderful weekend in Amsterdam and here’s the second part of that story.
When Femke, Tommy and I arrived at NEMO that Sunday morning, there was already a line of people waiting to get in! And it did turn out to be another great day. I didn’t take a lot of pictures myself, as there was already the photographer from the Didactief magazine and a few others with better cameras than mine, but I enjoyed every minute…
I did take some time to help Joeri from ASTRON (who I’d seen before in the audience in Dwingeloo) as well, although he’s brilliant enough on his own! It was just a spontaneous thing we came to talk about during the drinks afterwards the night before. All people from ASTRON were wearing these star necklaces with blinking lights. I broke my star, but what was left of it still blinked. Joeri had an extra star, but its batteries were low, so we tried to put the two together. And while holding our drinks and the six little batteries Joeri said in his best Sesame Street voice: “wor-king-to-get-her”, which resulted in batteries all over the place. We did turn out to be a great team in the end, when he asked my opinion about his plans for the fifteen minute lecture for kids about pulsars. Spinning kids around on chairs with flashlights? He had such good ideas! And suddenly we were doing it together.
We talked it through and agreed to improvise, so we were ready. Now how to get the kids to come to our ‘classroom’? Well, why don’t we just go and yell: “Come in if you want to be a lighthouse star!” is what I suggested. To my surprise Joeri liked that idea too and it was great fun! Afterwards this lady came to ask me if “Hanny and Joeri” were our artist names for our act and it sounded like she thought we were travelling around the country with this (!). You see why I get so enthusiastic?! At the end of the day we had a fantastic weekend to look back on and we were doing that on the roof terrace of NEMO, in the sunlight, while looking over Amsterdam. Ain’t life good.
Thank you Femke for asking me to help. Thank all of you nice people from ASTRON for making me feel so welcome. Thank you guys and girls from JWG for making sure we could have lunch on Sunday. Thanks to Josh for making the other, terrific poster! Thanks Mike for inviting us over next summer. Thanks to all the people who came to visit me! Thanks to Zookeeper Chris for the login codes. Thank you Joeri, for an inspiring weekend full of laughter. Thanks to my friends Tommy, Jan and Arie for their help and thank you Mats and friends for making that train trip a special one. I took one little soap from the hotel with me and smiled all the way back…
Ps. I promised a lot of people I would publish the ‘examples cards’ I made and were often used to explain ‘How to Zoo 2’ and I will soon. If you need them sooner, contact me.
Inside NEMO. This and the folowing pictures are taken by Lars Bähren.
Joeri van Leeuwen, the star from the duo “Joeri and Hanny”.
Eduardo from ASTRON, with the cool shirt we all had too.
Mike (general director of ASTRON) helping out in the funlab!
2 Comments
Yep, you and Joeri made a great team and the pulsars talk was really interesting, and fun too
the kids loved it. It’s amazing that this event pulled in around 7,500 visitors. I’m so glad to have been a part of this. Femke was lovely and it it was great to meet Joeri, Eduardo and the gang and Jan from the Zoo.
I was sad to have to leave early
Nice story about the Nemo weekend, Hanny! I missed the saturday-part of it, but sunday afternoon was a great experience. And one thing is very clear: young people are eager to help us with classifying!